I never said 2038 has anything to do with DST. I said that it is a y2k like problem where very old data storage systems will run into a limit and be unable to figure out if the next day is September 2038 or January 1970.
And every computer still has configuration files for timezones and DST info. Just because a computer CAN sync up with a central server doesn't mean it always does, and the issue is not knowing what time it is NOW, it is that of software being able to properly schedule for time in the future or accurately reflect time in the past. I can't just send a "what time is it really" query to some central generic server when writing for an event to take place in November 5th, 2013 (on the other side of the American line, but long since past the European switch, and yet not quite into the South American switch...oh, and Brazil nicely changes theirs every year so that it never changes before Carnevale is over, did you know that?).
I need to be absolutely accurate to the time the user expects it to happen, or else when that day comes up, the event they wanted is an hour off. I have to write the code to do this and trust that the libraries I rely on are accurate in their DST information.
And I have been writing software like this, in several languages, for much of the 20 years of my career so far.
The disruption is all in IT. Computers don't just magically know what time it is. They have a chip that tells them the number of microseconds since some arbitrary date (happens to be Jan 1, 1970, which means a 32bit int is gonna run out sometime around 2038 - the next "y2k" problem).
Everything else they need to be programmed to know. Every DB has its own implementation for deciding this. Every VM (including the JVM) has its own. Every OS kernel has its own. Every custom DB environment (like, say, airline reservation and tracking systems) all have their own. Every power grid system has its own.
When the rules change, these ALL need to be updated to keep up, and (this is the important bit) they kinda need to be updated in sync with each other, because each layer may be asking the previous layer what it thinks, but if someone doesn't update, say, windows XP ('cause MS won't push any patches for it), well, Java still needs to know and get it right, and so does Oracle and MySQL and PHP and any other number of things someone might be running on the XP box they can't afford to upgrade/replace (or why should they, it works just fine for what it is being used for, right?). In the airline industry, not only do the airlines need to be correct within their own systems, they need to be assured they are correct with regards to TSA's systems, and the FAA's systems, and every *separate and independent* airport's flight control tower (oh, and they all need to be correct with regards to each other as well). And that's even before we get into the issue of airline ticket purchase exchange systems, the means by which 3rd party sites like Orbitz and Priceline get their tickets - they need to be sure that they are getting the right information from every supplier of flights to their systems, or have their own means of helping the customer correct their flight reservations if they get it wrong because, say, US Airways didn't get a patch right.
So huge IT suppliers like Oracle and Microsoft and HP all need to work to keep their software correct with the changes, while not breaking the current dates before the change is actually meant to take place. Huge and small IT-dependent businesses all need to keep up with all of those patches and test their products and services on them in order to be sure they are right.
Getting it wrong could be disastrous. We got it right in 2006...but we could also have just gotten lucky. Going through that again will be painful.
When the Bush-era change happened, I supervised the change in my company, having to track the dozens of updates of Windows, Java, and Oracle (often because each one had to incorporate a patch to detect if one of the other two had not actually been patched). This amounted to basically $50,000 of my companies dollars wasted for no actual benefit - $50,000 just to say we still worked.
And the worst thing about it all was that even after all that money on our part, and on the part of Microsoft, Sun, and Oracle (who saw even less money relative to the efforts it took), nobody would be able to say 100% that it was "right". There still could have been one stupid little detail that would have gotten it wrong on the day of the switch or projecting forward to the switch-back.
Current estimates is that the DST change of 2005 cost the economy $5 billion in expenses *just to keep working at all* - that's 5 billion that wasn't spent on improvements, or new features, or anything actually giving new value to their customers. It simply ceased to exist, for the illusion of savings in other markets (energy and retail) that never materialized.
And I still saw most of my local trick-or-treaters after dark, so saying an extra hour of light for Halloween also was a pointless exercise.
Rule #1 for a large company: you don't anticipate markets with an eye to joining or ruling them. You kill them before they can start. If you can't do that, you play catch-up, or you use legal weight to try to stop them.
They were behind on phones and tablets in 2010 just like they were behind on the internet in 1995. They got *lucky* in 1995 that they could buy their way into it (at great expense: giving away IE and then all of the legal fees involved for the anti-trust cases in just about every country in the world...).
They simply couldn't get that lucky now 'cause everybody knew they would try and so could out-innovate knowing that was the one thing they could do that M$ couldn't (and never could, not since day one...).
Large companies, unless you're Apple (willing to sacrifice one generation of customers for another), or Google (able to get most of the products to drive eyeballs back to your core income stream), simply don't innovate. They simply don't try to take over businesses they aren't already in (except by buying their way in, a-la Oracle). Microsoft had all the brains in the world but would NEVER have actually let them create a new product line if it ever put Windows or Office at risk. Never. Just like Xerox could never market the desktop workstation because the paperless office was a threat to their copier business.
Microsoft simply would never have been able to compete here. Ever. Internally they couldn't muster it, externally the other companies knew how to handle them.
when they offer a paid service to see who has actually visited your home page. Classmates.com is (and always has been) failing for this very reason. LinkedIn has joined them.
Sorry, people, but if you have that information, either keep it to yourself, OR it should be my legal right to know who is e-stalking me. I shouldn't have to pay to know that.
Surveillance happens today at the server level: the Feds claim that, under the PATRIOT act, they can get the records of all visits and all 'cloud' data straight from the server - this is the "PRISM" project, but shades of it have been going for the past decade.
They don't need your client end. They get the server logs, they get the server history of visits, and reverse-lookup you and then collate all visits to as many web services as they can from the particular IP and MAC address, and that's how they put together your history.
Cookies, SSL, HTTPS, none of that matters. The only thing that would escape it is to route through anonymous proxies.
The Obama concern was never that 2008 Obama voters would "stray" to Romney. The Republicans moved so far to the right that even Romney was having trouble following his base (and that was one reason he lost: he showed clearly that he would follow the conservative base, not lead the country).
The Obama concern was that 2008 Obama voters *wouldn't show up at the polls*. Turnout was key. If those that disliked Obama (but disliked Romney more) just decided to stay home, he would have lost. In fact, in some regions he DID lose vs. his 2008 wins for that very reason, such as Lynchburg, VA.
What can be patented isn't the invention, but the process for making it en masse for modern needs. The quantity involved will far exceed the Roman usage.
The complications is that most volcanic rock today is protected by national or regional parks (partly to protect people from being too close for a long time). Etna, Vesuvius, Hawaii, Iceland - many of those aren't going to just let corporations come in with the same giant trucks they use for coal mines today and rip away 3/4s of the mountainside or lava flows to get the stuff.
...on the issue of the song's copyright. The law, under the Sonny Bono extension act, has already been upheld by the Supreme Court, so the lower court only need look at the publisher's claim and call it.
HOWEVER, if the whole point of her film is to point out the ridiculousness of all of this, she's got a very strong claim for 'Fair Use', since the work is being addressed in a critical commentary.
(crud, I meant to post that as me and not as anonymous...stupid new machine with no cookies...)
oh, and of course all of that is even before getting into the issue of why he thinks high school students should be walking to school before the sun has come up...
It cost this country *millions* to get all their software working and tested during the last change in the Bush era. I personally had to manage my company's conversion and testing, as we had to work with 3 versions of Windows, 2 versions of SunOS, 2 versions of Java to keep up with, 3 JDBC drivers, plus 2 versions of Oracle, each being patched every week in the lead-in as each had to determine if the other wasn't adapted/patched and had to work around it.
$150,000 for a simple 150 employee company to assign 5 people in development, QA, and IT, to keep up with it all for 2 months and hope like hell everything worked on the other side. And during all that time, none of the 5 of us could do stuff that really benefited our company and its product line.
Multiply that by every single small company, nevermind the huge companies like Microsoft and Oracle that had to eat all that cost of writing all those patches in the first place, and you get a wasted dollar figure so large that retail sales going up by 2% will NEVER make up for. We will never get that money back - the stock market slumped for a month in recovery.
And you want us to go through that again?
No offense, Mr. Johnson, but go to hell. I am not going through that again...
Little ones tend to toss phones aside when they get them, so be sure that you can fit the phone in some kind of protective case. The better ones out there, at least for iPad and iPhone (and iPod Touch) even have a blocker to prevent pressing the home button. However, they are all standardized for ipods, so be sure to try one on your android device first to be sure it fits and is secured and stable.
I can't speak for pre-toddler apps on android, as for my little one we opted for an iPod touch instead, since we knew it would 1) fit in those kinds of cases, and 2) be easier to secure vis-a-vie the home button, shopping sites, the settings panel. Fisher Price's apps have been good for our little one in the IOS. Some of those might have been ported.
The other important thing to watch for is the free preview apps - those are *entirely* for adults to try. When they reach their time or step limit, they may take you to the app store to purchase the full version. Make sure it doesn't do that before you hand it over to the kid to try.
One example are the company performance surveys, that are supposed to be anonymous. I cant answer questions like 'how do you think the company leadership is doing' without effectively giving away who I am - my opinion is based on my position, and thus is easily inferred.
That part of DJ is still there (from what I read). What is missing now is the way in which anybody (if you opened up your iTunes folders) could request tracks from the outside. Either they got rid of that for lack of use, or more likely because it opened up security holes that they didn't want to keep playing catch-up on closing.
I do like the fact that you can have it generally shuffle, but prioritize (weighted shuffle) those with higher ratings.
I hadn't really noticed the distinctions in winamp, but winamp is usually what I'm playing at work so I'm only barely paying attention.
The lack of gapless more sticks out on the music players of my tablet, and the cd-rom player in my car, which are the two times I'm more likely to listen to classical. If the CD broke the tracks up (a-la most recordings of Rite of Spring and Firebird) the gaps are very frustrating and I'm going to slowly re-rip most of them to be single-track (at least iTunes hasn't gotten rid of the 'merge these tracks when ripping' feature, which is very useful).
7 Features Apple Killed Off in iTunes 11. I was originally annoyed by removing the ability to edit the 'gapless' state of files (removing that one just seems stupid), but as no other player I use on any other platform supports the feature, I gave up caring.
Perhaps they should consider automatically updatable system (at least as far as software goes, hardware and moore's law is a different beast entirely), but automatic over the 'net. In particular, just like connecting to a phone via bluetooth, there's no reason the dashboard can't connect to the phone via the phone's ability to serve as a wifi hotspot to your cell network. For GPS, they could continue to have the flash memory and/or dvdrom (its still less than 4gig compressed) in the system to serve slightly out of date data 'til the phone and google maps is back in network. Otherwise you get all sorts of apps available (internet radio) all built into the dashboard but available because the dashboard is networked.
Granted, on city-wide wifi networks it can be a bit of a stressload on those routers...'til 5-10 years from now when most cities have better and wide-spread networks.
But by going 802.11, it totally avoids any network specialties and patents by letting the phone deal with them. It just assumes a hotspot is in the car and goes from there.
Or another option is to build the capabilities into the phone and just have the screen serve as an additional monitor and touch-screen for it...but that requires Android and Apple agreeing on a few standards and not patenting any of them (and Microsoft following them), and how likely is that in the lawsuit land we live in today. Hence, let the dashboard designers just do what they want to do without caring about the source of the network and avoid a lot of patent issues that might never get resolved by the time the car is obsolete.
We have heard this word as the great content rescuer come from on high for well more than 15 years now.
Where is it?
When will we get it?
it isn't going to happen, for the same reason so people won't pay for a $1.99 app (yet buy a $15 album just to get one song). the choice to pay or not pay is itself more stressful than just not reading the content or getting the download. And we've known this for years.
subscriptions help, but in the paper world, subscriptions are a means to more targeted advertising (guaranteed eyeballs, tighter demographics analysis). if you really paid what an advertiser covers in a magazine subscription, you'd be paying 4-10 times as much for the same content.
The UK lost out because at a certain point, the innovations necessary to continue to progress required more and more specialized technical education. The British University system was simply not set up to handle that. It was designed to turn the sons of Lords into Lords, and the upper middle-class into educated Lordly-like young men, optimized for leading business, but NOT in leading technical innovation (or military strategy, for that matter). Such a hands-on education was beneath them.
In addition, they always felt they didn't need such innovation in re-inventing that which they already had because of their extensive colonial might. Why invent a blue dye and undercut the price tag you were already commanding by being able to bring in the dye from the east-asian source?
Germany, on the other hand, spent most of the last decades of the 19th century realizing that trade schools, which the British wouldn't invest in, were precisely the means by which Germany could catch up to the rest of the world. German innovation happened most in the field of chemistry, where they were more and more able to invent (from coal and coal tar) products that could make up for places they lacked both colonies or military power. The process for sodium-nitrates alone (originally to be a fertilizer) produced enough explosives to preserve the German army for years through WW1.
how the hell does that NOT reflect exactly what Google Desktop already did - search locally and search internet in same results set?
nevermind the obviousness of such an idea...
but then again, it isn't THAT obvious given that I don't think i've ever actually searched my phone before except while it was mounted as a filesystem on some other O/S...
Instagram's servers in that cloud server were also affected, and more people griped about that on my facebook feed than netflix.
as for "an electrical storm", that's a bit of an understatement. The issue was actually more the 80 mph wind gusts as well as the lightning continuing on for 2 hours after the wind and rain had passed (meaning crews couldn't get out there overnight).
The result is some 2 million people without power, 1 million around DC alone. Dominion Power (which services the area where the data center resides, about 5 miles from my house) lost power for more than half of its northern virginia customers, and even now has only restored power to about 60,000* out of 461,000 that lost it. On the Maryland/DC side of the potomac, half a million people may be without power for days through a 100 degree each day heat wave (and more storms like last nights coming...).
* fortunately that would include me...though i'm writing this via my sprint phone as a wifi hotspot 'cause our cable modem is still down;-)
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I never said 2038 has anything to do with DST. I said that it is a y2k like problem where very old data storage systems will run into a limit and be unable to figure out if the next day is September 2038 or January 1970.
And every computer still has configuration files for timezones and DST info. Just because a computer CAN sync up with a central server doesn't mean it always does, and the issue is not knowing what time it is NOW, it is that of software being able to properly schedule for time in the future or accurately reflect time in the past. I can't just send a "what time is it really" query to some central generic server when writing for an event to take place in November 5th, 2013 (on the other side of the American line, but long since past the European switch, and yet not quite into the South American switch...oh, and Brazil nicely changes theirs every year so that it never changes before Carnevale is over, did you know that?).
I need to be absolutely accurate to the time the user expects it to happen, or else when that day comes up, the event they wanted is an hour off. I have to write the code to do this and trust that the libraries I rely on are accurate in their DST information.
And I have been writing software like this, in several languages, for much of the 20 years of my career so far.
How about you?
The disruption is all in IT. Computers don't just magically know what time it is. They have a chip that tells them the number of microseconds since some arbitrary date (happens to be Jan 1, 1970, which means a 32bit int is gonna run out sometime around 2038 - the next "y2k" problem).
Everything else they need to be programmed to know. Every DB has its own implementation for deciding this. Every VM (including the JVM) has its own. Every OS kernel has its own. Every custom DB environment (like, say, airline reservation and tracking systems) all have their own. Every power grid system has its own.
When the rules change, these ALL need to be updated to keep up, and (this is the important bit) they kinda need to be updated in sync with each other, because each layer may be asking the previous layer what it thinks, but if someone doesn't update, say, windows XP ('cause MS won't push any patches for it), well, Java still needs to know and get it right, and so does Oracle and MySQL and PHP and any other number of things someone might be running on the XP box they can't afford to upgrade/replace (or why should they, it works just fine for what it is being used for, right?). In the airline industry, not only do the airlines need to be correct within their own systems, they need to be assured they are correct with regards to TSA's systems, and the FAA's systems, and every *separate and independent* airport's flight control tower (oh, and they all need to be correct with regards to each other as well). And that's even before we get into the issue of airline ticket purchase exchange systems, the means by which 3rd party sites like Orbitz and Priceline get their tickets - they need to be sure that they are getting the right information from every supplier of flights to their systems, or have their own means of helping the customer correct their flight reservations if they get it wrong because, say, US Airways didn't get a patch right.
So huge IT suppliers like Oracle and Microsoft and HP all need to work to keep their software correct with the changes, while not breaking the current dates before the change is actually meant to take place. Huge and small IT-dependent businesses all need to keep up with all of those patches and test their products and services on them in order to be sure they are right.
Getting it wrong could be disastrous. We got it right in 2006...but we could also have just gotten lucky. Going through that again will be painful.
When the Bush-era change happened, I supervised the change in my company, having to track the dozens of updates of Windows, Java, and Oracle (often because each one had to incorporate a patch to detect if one of the other two had not actually been patched). This amounted to basically $50,000 of my companies dollars wasted for no actual benefit - $50,000 just to say we still worked.
And the worst thing about it all was that even after all that money on our part, and on the part of Microsoft, Sun, and Oracle (who saw even less money relative to the efforts it took), nobody would be able to say 100% that it was "right". There still could have been one stupid little detail that would have gotten it wrong on the day of the switch or projecting forward to the switch-back.
Current estimates is that the DST change of 2005 cost the economy $5 billion in expenses *just to keep working at all* - that's 5 billion that wasn't spent on improvements, or new features, or anything actually giving new value to their customers. It simply ceased to exist, for the illusion of savings in other markets (energy and retail) that never materialized.
And I still saw most of my local trick-or-treaters after dark, so saying an extra hour of light for Halloween also was a pointless exercise.
As if getting Tenure had anything to do with how good a teacher you were...
Who are they kidding?
Rule #1 for a large company: you don't anticipate markets with an eye to joining or ruling them. You kill them before they can start. If you can't do that, you play catch-up, or you use legal weight to try to stop them.
They were behind on phones and tablets in 2010 just like they were behind on the internet in 1995. They got *lucky* in 1995 that they could buy their way into it (at great expense: giving away IE and then all of the legal fees involved for the anti-trust cases in just about every country in the world...).
They simply couldn't get that lucky now 'cause everybody knew they would try and so could out-innovate knowing that was the one thing they could do that M$ couldn't (and never could, not since day one...).
Large companies, unless you're Apple (willing to sacrifice one generation of customers for another), or Google (able to get most of the products to drive eyeballs back to your core income stream), simply don't innovate. They simply don't try to take over businesses they aren't already in (except by buying their way in, a-la Oracle). Microsoft had all the brains in the world but would NEVER have actually let them create a new product line if it ever put Windows or Office at risk. Never. Just like Xerox could never market the desktop workstation because the paperless office was a threat to their copier business.
Microsoft simply would never have been able to compete here. Ever. Internally they couldn't muster it, externally the other companies knew how to handle them.
when they offer a paid service to see who has actually visited your home page. Classmates.com is (and always has been) failing for this very reason. LinkedIn has joined them.
Sorry, people, but if you have that information, either keep it to yourself, OR it should be my legal right to know who is e-stalking me. I shouldn't have to pay to know that.
Age Discrimination.
Surveillance happens today at the server level: the Feds claim that, under the PATRIOT act, they can get the records of all visits and all 'cloud' data straight from the server - this is the "PRISM" project, but shades of it have been going for the past decade.
They don't need your client end. They get the server logs, they get the server history of visits, and reverse-lookup you and then collate all visits to as many web services as they can from the particular IP and MAC address, and that's how they put together your history.
Cookies, SSL, HTTPS, none of that matters. The only thing that would escape it is to route through anonymous proxies.
The Obama concern was never that 2008 Obama voters would "stray" to Romney. The Republicans moved so far to the right that even Romney was having trouble following his base (and that was one reason he lost: he showed clearly that he would follow the conservative base, not lead the country).
The Obama concern was that 2008 Obama voters *wouldn't show up at the polls*. Turnout was key. If those that disliked Obama (but disliked Romney more) just decided to stay home, he would have lost. In fact, in some regions he DID lose vs. his 2008 wins for that very reason, such as Lynchburg, VA.
Thanks for the clarification. :)
What can be patented isn't the invention, but the process for making it en masse for modern needs. The quantity involved will far exceed the Roman usage.
The complications is that most volcanic rock today is protected by national or regional parks (partly to protect people from being too close for a long time). Etna, Vesuvius, Hawaii, Iceland - many of those aren't going to just let corporations come in with the same giant trucks they use for coal mines today and rip away 3/4s of the mountainside or lava flows to get the stuff.
...on the issue of the song's copyright. The law, under the Sonny Bono extension act, has already been upheld by the Supreme Court, so the lower court only need look at the publisher's claim and call it.
HOWEVER, if the whole point of her film is to point out the ridiculousness of all of this, she's got a very strong claim for 'Fair Use', since the work is being addressed in a critical commentary.
(crud, I meant to post that as me and not as anonymous...stupid new machine with no cookies...)
A few years back, the Russians went to DST-365(.25) - locked the clocks forward 1 hour and stayed that way.
oh, and of course all of that is even before getting into the issue of why he thinks high school students should be walking to school before the sun has come up...
It cost this country *millions* to get all their software working and tested during the last change in the Bush era. I personally had to manage my company's conversion and testing, as we had to work with 3 versions of Windows, 2 versions of SunOS, 2 versions of Java to keep up with, 3 JDBC drivers, plus 2 versions of Oracle, each being patched every week in the lead-in as each had to determine if the other wasn't adapted/patched and had to work around it.
$150,000 for a simple 150 employee company to assign 5 people in development, QA, and IT, to keep up with it all for 2 months and hope like hell everything worked on the other side. And during all that time, none of the 5 of us could do stuff that really benefited our company and its product line.
Multiply that by every single small company, nevermind the huge companies like Microsoft and Oracle that had to eat all that cost of writing all those patches in the first place, and you get a wasted dollar figure so large that retail sales going up by 2% will NEVER make up for. We will never get that money back - the stock market slumped for a month in recovery.
And you want us to go through that again?
No offense, Mr. Johnson, but go to hell. I am not going through that again...
Little ones tend to toss phones aside when they get them, so be sure that you can fit the phone in some kind of protective case. The better ones out there, at least for iPad and iPhone (and iPod Touch) even have a blocker to prevent pressing the home button. However, they are all standardized for ipods, so be sure to try one on your android device first to be sure it fits and is secured and stable.
I can't speak for pre-toddler apps on android, as for my little one we opted for an iPod touch instead, since we knew it would 1) fit in those kinds of cases, and 2) be easier to secure vis-a-vie the home button, shopping sites, the settings panel. Fisher Price's apps have been good for our little one in the IOS. Some of those might have been ported.
The other important thing to watch for is the free preview apps - those are *entirely* for adults to try. When they reach their time or step limit, they may take you to the app store to purchase the full version. Make sure it doesn't do that before you hand it over to the kid to try.
One example are the company performance surveys, that are supposed to be anonymous. I cant answer questions like 'how do you think the company leadership is doing' without effectively giving away who I am - my opinion is based on my position, and thus is easily inferred.
That part of DJ is still there (from what I read). What is missing now is the way in which anybody (if you opened up your iTunes folders) could request tracks from the outside. Either they got rid of that for lack of use, or more likely because it opened up security holes that they didn't want to keep playing catch-up on closing.
I do like the fact that you can have it generally shuffle, but prioritize (weighted shuffle) those with higher ratings.
I hadn't really noticed the distinctions in winamp, but winamp is usually what I'm playing at work so I'm only barely paying attention.
The lack of gapless more sticks out on the music players of my tablet, and the cd-rom player in my car, which are the two times I'm more likely to listen to classical. If the CD broke the tracks up (a-la most recordings of Rite of Spring and Firebird) the gaps are very frustrating and I'm going to slowly re-rip most of them to be single-track (at least iTunes hasn't gotten rid of the 'merge these tracks when ripping' feature, which is very useful).
7 Features Apple Killed Off in iTunes 11. I was originally annoyed by removing the ability to edit the 'gapless' state of files (removing that one just seems stupid), but as no other player I use on any other platform supports the feature, I gave up caring.
Perhaps they should consider automatically updatable system (at least as far as software goes, hardware and moore's law is a different beast entirely), but automatic over the 'net. In particular, just like connecting to a phone via bluetooth, there's no reason the dashboard can't connect to the phone via the phone's ability to serve as a wifi hotspot to your cell network. For GPS, they could continue to have the flash memory and/or dvdrom (its still less than 4gig compressed) in the system to serve slightly out of date data 'til the phone and google maps is back in network. Otherwise you get all sorts of apps available (internet radio) all built into the dashboard but available because the dashboard is networked.
Granted, on city-wide wifi networks it can be a bit of a stressload on those routers...'til 5-10 years from now when most cities have better and wide-spread networks.
But by going 802.11, it totally avoids any network specialties and patents by letting the phone deal with them. It just assumes a hotspot is in the car and goes from there.
Or another option is to build the capabilities into the phone and just have the screen serve as an additional monitor and touch-screen for it...but that requires Android and Apple agreeing on a few standards and not patenting any of them (and Microsoft following them), and how likely is that in the lawsuit land we live in today. Hence, let the dashboard designers just do what they want to do without caring about the source of the network and avoid a lot of patent issues that might never get resolved by the time the car is obsolete.
"micropayments"
We have heard this word as the great content rescuer come from on high for well more than 15 years now.
Where is it?
When will we get it?
it isn't going to happen, for the same reason so people won't pay for a $1.99 app (yet buy a $15 album just to get one song). the choice to pay or not pay is itself more stressful than just not reading the content or getting the download. And we've known this for years.
subscriptions help, but in the paper world, subscriptions are a means to more targeted advertising (guaranteed eyeballs, tighter demographics analysis). if you really paid what an advertiser covers in a magazine subscription, you'd be paying 4-10 times as much for the same content.
The UK lost out because at a certain point, the innovations necessary to continue to progress required more and more specialized technical education. The British University system was simply not set up to handle that. It was designed to turn the sons of Lords into Lords, and the upper middle-class into educated Lordly-like young men, optimized for leading business, but NOT in leading technical innovation (or military strategy, for that matter). Such a hands-on education was beneath them.
In addition, they always felt they didn't need such innovation in re-inventing that which they already had because of their extensive colonial might. Why invent a blue dye and undercut the price tag you were already commanding by being able to bring in the dye from the east-asian source?
Germany, on the other hand, spent most of the last decades of the 19th century realizing that trade schools, which the British wouldn't invest in, were precisely the means by which Germany could catch up to the rest of the world. German innovation happened most in the field of chemistry, where they were more and more able to invent (from coal and coal tar) products that could make up for places they lacked both colonies or military power. The process for sodium-nitrates alone (originally to be a fertilizer) produced enough explosives to preserve the German army for years through WW1.
how the hell does that NOT reflect exactly what Google Desktop already did - search locally and search internet in same results set?
nevermind the obviousness of such an idea...
but then again, it isn't THAT obvious given that I don't think i've ever actually searched my phone before except while it was mounted as a filesystem on some other O/S...
Instagram's servers in that cloud server were also affected, and more people griped about that on my facebook feed than netflix.
as for "an electrical storm", that's a bit of an understatement. The issue was actually more the 80 mph wind gusts as well as the lightning continuing on for 2 hours after the wind and rain had passed (meaning crews couldn't get out there overnight).
The result is some 2 million people without power, 1 million around DC alone. Dominion Power (which services the area where the data center resides, about 5 miles from my house) lost power for more than half of its northern virginia customers, and even now has only restored power to about 60,000* out of 461,000 that lost it. On the Maryland/DC side of the potomac, half a million people may be without power for days through a 100 degree each day heat wave (and more storms like last nights coming...).
* fortunately that would include me...though i'm writing this via my sprint phone as a wifi hotspot 'cause our cable modem is still down ;-)